Naked Lunch

'Enough to turn a body to stone.'

Paul spoke wiser than he know being a really evil old shit when he talk about men lying with men doing that which is inconvenient. Inconvenient is the word. So who want to trip over a cock on the way to a cunt, and when a citizen get the yen to hump a gash, some evil stranger rush in and do that which is inconvenient to his ass.

A. J. rush across San Marco slashing at pigeons with a cutlass: 'Bastards! Sons of bitches!' he screams.... He staggers aboard his barge, a monstrous construction in gilt and pink and blue with sails of purple velvet. He is dressed in a preposterous naval uniform covered with braid and ribbons and medals, dirty and torn, the coat buttoned in the wrong holes.... A. J. walks to a huge reproduction of a Greek urn topped by a gold statue of a boy with an erection. He twists the boy's balls and a jet of champagne spurts into his mouth. He wipes his mouth and looks around.

'Where are my Nubians, God damn it?' he yells.

His secretary looks up from a comic book: 'Juicing. ...Chasing cunt.'

'Goldbricking cocksuckers. Where's a man without his Nubians?'

'Take a gondola whyncha?'

'A gondola?' A. J. screams. 'I put out for this cocksucker I should ride in a gondola already? Reef the mainsail and ship the oars, Mr. Hyslop.... I'm gonna make with the auxiliary.' Mr. Hyslop 76

shrugs resignedly. With one finger he begins punching a switchboard.... The sails drop, the oars draw into the hull.

'And turn on the perfume whyncha? The canal stinks up a breeze.'

'Gardenia? Sandlewood?'

'Naw. Ambrosia.' Mr. Hyslop presses another button and a thick cloud of perfume settles over the barge. A. J. is seized with a fit of coughing....

'Make with the fans' he yells. 'I'm suffocatin'!' Mr. Hyslop is coughing into a handkerchief. He presses a button. Fans whir and thin out the ambrosia. A. J. in-stalls himself at the rudder on a raised dais. 'Contact!' The barge begins to vibrate. 'Avanti, God damn it!' A. J. yells and the barge takes off across the canal at a tremendous speed overturning gondolas full of tourists, missing the motoscafi by inches, veering from one side of the canal to the other (the wake washes over the sidewalks drenching passersby) shattering a fleet of moored gondolas, and finally piles up against a pier, spins out into the middle of the canal.... A column of water spurts six feet in the air from a hole in the hull.

'Man the pumps, Mr. Hyslop. She's shipping water.' The barge gives a sudden lurch throwing A. J. into the canal.

'Abandon ship, God damn it! Every man for himself!' Fadeout to Mambo music. The inauguration of Escuela Amigo, a school for delinquent boys of Latin American origin, endowed by A. J., Faculty Boys and press attending. A. J. staggers out onto a platform draped with American flags.

'In the immortal words of Father Flanagan there is no such thing as a bad boy.... Where's the statuary, God damn it?'

TECHNICIAN: 'You want it now?'

A. J.: 'What you think I'm doing here Furthucrisakes? I should unveil the son of a bitch in abstentia?'

TECHNICIAN: 'All right... All right. Coming right up.' The statue is towed out by a Graham Hymie tractor and placed in front of the platform. A. J. presses a button. Turbines start under the platform, rising to a deafening whine. Wind blows the red velvet drapes off the statue. They tangle around the Faculty members in the front row.... Clouds of dust and debris whip through the spectators. The sirens slowly subside. The Faculty disengages itself from the drapes.... Everyone is looking at the statue in breathless silence.

FATHER GONZALEZ: 'Mother of God!'

THE MAN FROM Time: 'I don't believe it.' Daily News: 'It's nothing but fruity.'

Chorus of whistles from the boys.

A monumental creation in shiny pink stone stands revealed as the dust settles. A naked boy is bending over a sleeping comrade with evident intention to waken him with a flute. One hand is holding the flute, the other reaching for a piece of cloth draped over the sleeper's middle. The cloth bulges suggestively. Both boys wear a flower behind the ear, identical expressions, dreamy and brutal, depraved and innocent. This creations tops a limestone pyramid on which is inscribed in letters of porcelain mosaic --pink and blue and gold --the school motto: ' With it and for it.' A. J. lurches forward and breaks a champagne bottle across the boy's taut buttocks.